


Inamorata

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Mindfuck, Mystery, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-02 21:42:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1061970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hunt that Dean can’t remember breaks his leg and possibly his sanity, and he and Sam end up at The Inamorata, a beautiful old convalescent hotel that looks like something from the Victorian Age. But the longer they spend there, the more Dean wonders if they’re both slowly yet permanently losing their minds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> This is different from the things I've written because it's in third person authorial voice, a voice I thought suitable for a Victorian-esque horror story. Concrit is very much adored.

Dean Winchester collected people.

It was his newest hobby, and he went about it with great gusto, primarily because there was nothing else to do in this hellhole dressed up pretty as a convalescent hotel, but also because it gave him a kick to regale Sam with the stories of old women and their sordid affairs. There was strange catharsis in the way Sam’s mouth would curl in disgust at the long and colourful tale of how Miss Florence and Miss Daisy of Room 233 had met at a boy brothel in Thailand.

“They’ve been in love ever since. Like, mad love. Hey, you think they still—”

Sam, sitting on the mahogany desk across the room, put out one hand in forceful entreaty. “Don’t say it, Dean!”

“What? They’re nice old ladies. Don’t judge them.”

“I’m not judging _them._ You’re the one turning their Nicholas Sparks tale into sixty-plus porn!”

This was unfair, as Dean wasn’t entirely sure who Nicholas Sparks was, or whether he knew anything about boy brothels in Thailand. But then, if Sam was being fair and kind all the time, he wouldn’t be _Sam_ but a figment of Dean’s imagination. Figments of imagination were perfect like that, because they came naturally tuned to a frequency that made them vibrate with niceness and stellar understanding. This frowning Sam,  who hid Dean’s box of Thorne’s Toffee or pressed cold fingers to the back of his neck when Dean came in from his mandatory walk, already cold and freezing—this Sam was far from perfect. Or maybe _this_ was perfect. He didn’t know.  It was kind of hard to wrap his mind around this, actually.

What was he even thinking about?

“Blake’s got Rosemary Cyriac locked up in her room. She’s kicking up a tantrum like always. Just _convinced_ that she’s dead, and her skin is falling off.”

“There’s a name for that,” Sam said, crossing the room to peer out of the large sloping windows. Green light poured in through the windows and lit him up like a firework.  “Cotard’s Delusion.”

 “I know. We did that case in Liberty once, remember? Only the _doctors_ thought it was Cotard’s Delusion, when it was actually a voodoo revival.”

Sam grinned. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, anyway. Rosemary’s got a knife. I saw it while Blake was trying to restrain her.”

“Whoa,” Sam said, impressed. “How did she score that?”

“I don’t know, dude. But I figure, if a girl who thinks she’s a zombie can get one so easily, why can’t we?”

Sam’s smile got wider, more malevolent.  “You should try. During dinner.”

Dean groaned inwardly, flopping back on his starchy white bed. Above him, wooden rafters and beams crossed each other, and a tulip-shaped lamp swung almost imperceptibly on its metal chain. From outside came a chiming, and Dean counted on his fingers: _one, two, three, four, five._ Down in the courtyard, Mr. Carter would be setting the hospital’s sundial, as his anxiety compelled him to. Martha May would be walking in the gazebo, muttering to herself about infinite recursion. Daisy and Florence would be taking their crocheting out into the open terrace, where they’d gossip and stitch and glare at the flowers that had bloomed too bright for their tired eyes. At seven, they’d all assemble down in the formal dining room, and Dean would make faces at the platters of salads and the tureens of soups and the meat that’s cooked with too many ingredients for him to like it while Sam maybe smirked at him.

 _Inamorata_ was predictable.

There was clockwork discipline and placidity, all rooted in some sort of strange Augustan sensibility that suited the place—so much of it that it’d drive him mad one day. He felt strange here, like a time-traveller from the future. The peace grated on his nerves and made Dean nervous and excited, jonesing for chaos.  Sam made a case of pointing this out to the doctor whenever he could, going so far as to call it “your school-shooter syndrome, dude”, but so far Doctor Hurley had ignored him, which only amped up the luminescence of the torch Dean had been carrying for her since the day they’d met.

Which was, oh, a while ago.

Dean couldn’t even remember the last hunt.

 _A ghost in Lafayette,_ Sam had said. _It broke your head._

Dean supposed it had, because often he dreamed that the walls of the hotel were melting, that he was stuck under a rafter, that there were bugs crawling over him with chthonic fervour.

_It also broke your leg._

This was rather true as well, as made evident by the cane that Dean had to lean half his weight on when he walked. Like everything else in _Inamorata_ , it was a rather nice cane—polished wood with a curving golden handhold—and he wished they’d also give him a pipe or something so he could walk around the conservatory pretending to be an injured Rhett Butler. (Doctor Hurley could be his Scarlett.)

 _It also broke_ MY _head._

This was the one thing that sort of really worried Dean in its plausibility, since Sam now hated outdoors with rabid zeal. He’d rather stay in here, in this small room with its pretty wooden floor and the Underwood Universal Portable typewriter in the corner, pacing in increasingly tiny circles or typing whatever the hell it was that he was stacking up on the one-legged corner table. He barely ever came down for dinner. It had gotten worse enough that Florence and Daisy thought he was a ghost whenever Dean mentioned him.

“You poor dear!” they’d exclaim to Dean, and cross themselves.

“But you’re not a ghost,” Dean told Sam now,  watching both his brother and the light outside, which was just changing to a mellow yellow. For a moment Sam looked at him, his eyes that cold flickering grey-green like… _like clingy lichen_ , thought Dean who had recently become very bizarrely literary, _the kind that sticks to even the most brutal mountains._

But then Sam softened and went all endearingly rumpled somehow, like he was upset at Dean for the tone of doubt in his voice. Dean squirmed around on the bed, making some space, and Sam came to him, and Sam stayed; though it was rather uncomfortable in this tiny bed. Dean pressed his cheek against the cold wall and Sam curled up against him, effectively trapping him there. It was like he’d been tucked into a well-loved crease, and the thought made him smile.

Dean wondered sometimes if he should nudge the manager, Something Michaels, to hurry up and get them a second bed—there were two of them for God’s sake, and Sam hogged blankets— but they did okay, all things considered.

*

“I once fell through a glass door,” Barron White said, in his sepulchral baritone. “When I was a kid.”

Evening in the foyer, and they were all sitting around a table, cards and tonics and books piled between them. Nurses Ames and Sefton were in the corner, thumbing through thick black and white magazines. The furniture and the sweeping chandeliers dwarfed them all.

 _Inamorata_ was a tall, three-storeyed  building, the foundation of which was a strange medley of granite and white brick. From there it rose, red-gold brick, sloping red roofs and charming creepers climbing up the sides, right to where its sharp gambrels punched the sky. There was a giant clock too, maintained by the same extremely ill-tempered man who managed the grounds and the elevators. It was a trope, Dean thought when he first met Blake. The groundskeepers were _always_ crotchety old men, unless they were Hagrid. 

“That ain’t the two of clubs, man,” Dean said, and Barron flipped his card over, sighing that Dean had caught his bluff.

“How ‘bout you, Mr. Carter?” Florence called, as quietly as possible. Mr. Carter still startled, dropping his suit and looking around wildly like he’d just found himself in the midst of seven terrible Amazonian deities. He was in _Inamorata_ for “nerves”, so it wasn’t like anyone could blame him. Still, Dean smirked and Daisy smacked him on the back of his head with a rolled-up newspaper.

Mr. Carter mumbled, “W-what?”

“Have you had any strange accidents? We’ve all had them. Daisy and I once forgot an entire night and woke up in a different country.”

“It was nasty.”

“There was a beast of a man involved.”

“We don’t want to know!” barked Rosemary, doped up enough that she grudgingly accepted her place in the land of the living for now.

“Well, George, dear?”

 Mr. Carter blushed. “I once ran over a dog. The horse got spooked and we nearly crashed into a tree.”

“How _horrible.”_

“That’s just ghastly.”

“How about you, Dean?”

Dean thought about this. “I fell off a bridge once.”

“Honestly? How did you accomplish that?”

“A ghost was driving my car.”

“This one, he’s always about ghosts.” Florence sighed, petting at Dean’s arm. “You’d do well to pick up some beads, dear. Say your Hail Marys.”

What he’d do well to, Dean knew, was to score a knife.  Sam maintained that the manager of the place, this Michaels person, was a friend of Bobby’s and that was how they’d ended up here, but it was driving them stir-crazy. Look at Dean, spending all day collecting stories. Look at _Sam,_ who was possibly even more insane than Dean felt. There was no cell-phone reception here, and the telephone did go through to Bobby, only Dean had gotten a voice message: _Dean, if this is you, boy, you stay there and HEAL, for the love of God._

But they wouldn’t, would they? He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. This place was ancient, and all its citizens seemed ancient. It was like being in The Tudors, minus all the sexy times.

Frances Sefton placed a glass of water in front of Dean, startling him out of his thoughts.

“Your pills, Mr. Winchester.”

Pills were strange in this place. Aspirin came out of boxes, for one, large metal ones with thick writing on it that said _Laymon’s Five-Grain_. Syringes came out of metal boxes too and hurt like bitches. Once, he caught Nurse Ames sharpening the needles with a whet rock, and she’d explained patiently how the needles sometimes got clogged with the limestone, and you’d have to insert tiny wires to unclog them.

“You also need to sterilize them,” she said, smiling at his utterly flabbergasted expression, “We boil them in water. But we have to be careful that the temperature doesn’t stay too hot on the needles for too long, or else they’ll just explode.”

Dean had mentioned this to Doctor Hurley, who just frowned and raised the dosage of his medication, sure he’d been dreaming.

  _I mean,_ Sam said later, agreeing with her, _who sharpens needles these days? You’ve just gone nuts._

“Um. Thanks. Hey, Frances. You wouldn’t mind if I took a walk?”

Frances-of-the-unfortunate-name shook her head. “Sure. It’s good for your nerves,  Mr. Winchester. Do you want me to accompany you?”

That would be the last thing he wanted.

“No, no. I’ll be fine.”

The grounds of the hospital spread out over acres of land, and there were two large bath reservoirs that used pipelines to bring in salt water from the sea. Salt and the chalybeate groundwater mixed together in the reservoirs and formed a rather vile-tasting green-yellow water, which they all had to drink at least once a day. It was a new kind of daily torment, which sort of delighted Dean.

The “chalybeate groundwater” was one of the main reasons _Inamorata_ was even built: in the 1900s, the hospital had served as a seaside convalescent home for the very affluent. Dean had had to look up _chalybeate_ on the dictionary (it meant iron), because there was no internet.

It was strange, the sudden absence of Search the Web from their lives. 

Dean took a circuitous path through the gardens and past the conservatory, right to the edge of the walls where the night watchman gave him a wary look. He craned his head to look over the gates and there was nothing else around for miles. Swallowing the sudden bad taste in his mouth, he turned and walked in a different direction. The night was cool, scented with blooming azaleas and full of the sounds of nightjars and cicadas, lonely whippoorwills calling in the distance.

He walked at a slow pace, impeded terribly by the bad leg, which gave him a jolt of pain every time he pressed down on it. By the time he came to the eastern boundary, he was sweating a bit from the pain, and wishing the aspirin would fucking kick in already.

Dean found steps cut into the raised hill on which the _Inamorata_ was built, steps leading down into the semi-dark. By the light of the moon, he could see railway tracks and the top of a railroad tunnel. Not very far down the tracks, there was a light—warm and yellow. A house. His heart leapt a bit, and some kind of odd emotion pushed against his mind. It was fuzzy and muted like everything was these days, like he was always looking through a wall of clouds.

Doctor Hurley was going to kill him. _Sam_ was going to kill him.

Dean went down the steps, far too slowly and grunting at the drama his leg seemed determined to put him through. He started walking towards the house, his cane _tap-tapping_ hollowly against the railroad ties.

The rails were probably unused now, a part of the old steam-train heritage. Once long ago, large hospitals used them to bring in supplies and take out wastes. There was the small matter of several patients of establishments like the _Inamorata_ being famous: artists and actors and presidents—and if they died in their old age at a convalescent hotel far from the rest of the world, there would have to be hearse trains.

One of Dean’s favourite old urban legends was of the ghost of Abraham Lincoln’s hearse train. Hunters had been looking for it for years—the train that was said to appear annually around the anniversary of Lincoln’s death, barrelling from Washington right through to Springfield, stopping clocks and watches along the way.

Maybe it was all these thoughts about ghost trains and stuff, but were the rail tracks vibrating? Dean balanced precariously on his cane, leaning to touch fingers to the tracks. _Definitely_ vibrating. But these were unused, weren’t they? They had to be. Some of the railroad ties were missing. The runway was broken in several parts. Not to mention, there was no third rail, which meant no electricity, which meant it couldn’t be an electric train, which meant…what, exactly?

_Turn around and walk back._

He turned.

From here,  the hospital-hotel was visible, lights glowing warm as fires against its windows. Martha May was pressed against her window, as if she was screaming for help from the devouring fire. Dean shuddered and started walking back.

He focussed on the rails as he walked, puzzling at the increasing tempo of their vibrations. _There couldn’t be._ Unless it was a ghost train, of course. One couldn’t discount such possibilities.

He raised his head. From here, Inamorata was visible, lights glowing at the windows. Martha May was still at the window. She wasn’t any closer.

Dean turned, and the house was still the same distance away.

_What the fuck?_

He took a few more steps and immediately became disoriented. The further closer he walked towards the hotel, the farther it seemed to be. Like an inversion of parallax maybe. He closed his eyes, cold sweat beginning to bead at the back of his neck, and took a few more steps. The hotel actually got _smaller._

Dean turned again. The house hadn’t gotten any closer. So he was either walking in the right direction, or he wasn’t walking at all. Which didn’t make sense, because the pain in his leg was a living thing, clawing at him with renewed vigour.

The vibrating tracks sounded like thin whines, and everything living seemed to have gone quiet. How had he not noticed that before? No whippoorwills now. _And what did they say about whippoorwills?_

Death-omens, they were. Bad juju.

The air was suddenly too thick and hot to breathe.

_Just fucking keep walking._

It wasn’t doing much good. The hotel got ever smaller, and all the perspectives were wrong. _Dolly zoom,_ thought Dean. This was like Hitchcock and his celebrated dolly zoom. He’ll have to tell Sammy that, when he explained all this later on. _Later on._ Where was the train whistle coming from? His stomach lurched, and he whipped his head around. That house was still _right there._ Same distance. The rails were still singing, and Martha May still seemed to be burning, but farther away.

  _Infinite recursion_.

His head was starting to spin. He swallowed and it made him feel worse, the back of his throat uncomfortably wet. He had to have been walking for nearly half an hour and the hotel was tiny now. Dean retraced his steps a bit, turned around, and the house remained at the same place but the hotel got a bit bigger.

Dean dropped the cane and staggered at the sudden loss of balance, overcompensating to the right and landing all his weight on his bad leg. Pain shot up from his ankle and tore up his spine, and bright white flashed in his eyes.

Nausea winkled black-white-black. There was a sharp, horrible, rotten citrusy scent.

From his darkening perspective, Dean thought he saw a bright point of light growing ever larger, like a devouring sun.

A train. It had to be a _train._

*

“What kind of a fucking hospital is this that allows you to just wander around?”

Sam was livid. He was pacing in the corner of Dean’s vision, his arms alternately on his hips, running in panic through his hair, and picking up random things that he then proceeded to drop on the floor. He was giving Dean a headache. Or maybe that was Doctor Hurley, crouched over him and shining a flashlight into his eyes.

“Now, Mr. Winchester, you can’t have seen a train. There is no train. In fact, that railroad was demolished long ago. The summer cottages are there now, instead.”

“I s’w a _tr’in._ ” Dean said, churlish. His brain was in pieces, calling out to each other, trying to throw ropes across the gaps. _Inventory,_ he thought. Arms: check. Legs: check. Junk: check. Tongue: still waking up.

Doctor Hurley’s bright red lips curled in a smile. “Of course, you _thought_ you saw a train. It triggered a seizure, even, which worries me. But it wasn’t real, Dean. You’re okay, now. That’s what matters. We’ll deal with the rest.”

She was real pretty, Dean thought fuzzily. Then she went away and Sam was in his vision and Sam was real pretty too, with the medicated haze in his eyes throwing lights in his brother’s hair.

“What were you _thinking?”_ Sam growled, ruining the effect completely.

He went away again when Nurse Ames came into the room, poking and prodding and asking all sorts of questions. Dean kind of wanted him to come back because he hadn’t told Doctor Hurley the cool story about being stuck on the rails, going nowhere. That was something he was saving for Sam, because Doctor Hurley would probably just prescribe him even more pills. Sam, well. Sam _had_ to believe him. What else were they brothers for?

By the time Nurse Ames was done with him though, the throb of the metal cannula in his veins and the tongueless exhaustion of the whole ordeal was smothering him, pulling him under. He fought against it, wanting to theorize with Sam, wanting his genius college-boy brother to figure out what was off about this whole scenario.

 He cracked one eye open when the bed groaned somewhat, and Sam was sitting with him, long legs tucked under him and his hand making tiny warm circles on Dean’s back. It was nice, and simple _nice_ had been lost so long ago that Dean just gave in and went to sleep.

*

_There is something in the walls._

_Sam is a step ahead of him, EMF beeping, the light from Dean’s flashlight limning his shoulders gold. Dean finds an Altoids can on a table and shakes it, and something is at the bottom, rattling. He opens the can to find a tooth, with some flesh still attached to its roots._

_“Ugh, gross. That’s disgusting,” he says, picking it up and dangling it in front of Sam’s face, because being disgusted himself holds no candle to being amused by Sam’s disgust._

_“Oh God, Dean. I fucking hate you.”_

_“Hey. I double dare you to put it in your mouth.”_

_“Seriously. Are you four?”_

_Something in the walls._ Scritch-scritch, _like rats._

_“So this ghost—,” Dean starts._

_The scene shifts._

_Dean is running down twisted stairs. There’s no bottom. There’s only a drop into the basement._

_“Sammy!” he yells. “SAM!”_

_He skids to the very last stair, grabbing the balustrade for balance, peering through the hole in the floor. The ghost, the fucking ghost is there, and Sam—_

“Dean, it’s not real, DEAN!”

_The basement. There are rats, big ones, gleaming eyes. They’re crowding around him. Fuck, there was that story he read forever ago in an English class, something about a judge’s house. There was a painting, there was a giant rat, it tied a noose around his neck and hung the protagonist._

_Jesus. Why did they even teach that at school?_

_Sammy’s on his back. Dean crawls over to him; his breaths, his thoughts, his whole being a continuous litany of_ oh God please no _and there’s blood, there’s a hell lot of blood, something is horribly wrong, something—_

“Dean, come on! Hey!”

 A quick slap to his face brought him around, cheek smarting. Sam was leaning over him again, but so was Doctor Hurley. The ceiling of the hotel swirled like chocolate ice-cream.

“Just a dream,” Doctor Hurley said. Her dress was a bit askew at the shoulders. He could see the red triangle inked into her skin. _The alchemical symbol of fire._ He’d read that somewhere, long ago. “You’re okay now.”

Was he? He waited till she was gone before he reached out for Sam. He traced a line along Sam’s jaw, wondering.

“What?” Sam mouthed, his eyes large and questioning. He had this smile, this made-up thing. It stuck out like he’d force-fitted a wrong puzzle piece into place.

“I dreamed you shattered it. Isn’t that a fucked up dream, Sammy? I dreamed you shattered your jaw.”

Sam caught hold of his hand, squeezing, bringing it to his lips. “It was just a dream. You know that. You know it’s not real. Right?”

*

Sam was gone when he woke up again, but the typewriter was clicking. Dean eased out of bed and went over to it, and the thick ink on the paper spelled names.

_PHINEAS GAGE— ANATOLI BUGORSKI— EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE— DELILAH DAWSON._

He picked up the typewritten pages that Sam had left stacked on the table. The same names. Repeating, through the length of the page.

He crumpled up the first paper and threw it on the floor. The second one was the same. And the third, and the fourth. Dean tore through the stack, looking for one page that was different, one page that would offer any clues. There were none. The _entire_ stack were the same names, repeating over and over again. P’s and A’s blurred in his vision. The ink ran over the page, smudged in places. It seemed to make a pattern there, a wheel maybe or something more terrible, more esoteric; something you would find on a fossilized rock or carved into a glacier or into the intestines of little gold-eyed children. It shifted as he looked at it, the points changing, a ripple effect that suddenly tunnelled his focus to that page alone.

He ripped it up. He ripped it _all_ up. Frustrated, he let it fall all around him like ruined snow. He felt his stomach lurch violently. He staggered and fell into a chair and tried to think. Nothing got past the wall of clouds in his mind.

Outside in the hallway, Nurse Ames was pushing a medicine cart slowly past the doors. Dean called out to her and she turned, smiling.

“Yes, Mr. Winchester?”

“Have you seen my brother?”

Nurse Ames’s smile vanished. “Mr. Winchester—”

“Dude, I’m right here,” said Sam, and so he was. He leaned against the wall behind Dean, a stack of books in his arms. “I was at the library.”

“This place has a library?” grunted Dean. Sam pushed through the door and into their room, and Dean followed him in. “Hey, what the hell is with your—”

He stopped short. Sam turned to him, questioning.

“Yeah?”

Dean looked at the room, at the stack of papers now neatly back on the table, the typewriter quiet and empty of paper. Had he imagined it all then? Some kind of _idée fixe_ hallucination? _What the hell?_

“I thought—never mind. What are you—what do you keep typing?”

Sam grinned and deposited his books on the table. “This place has fascinating history. Mr. Michaels told me to knock myself out while we get you back on your feet, so I’ve been reading.  It’s all witch-trail histrionics like you won’t believe, Dean. Absolutely crazy. I found this whole research paper, and there’s some mad shit about unauthorized transorbital lobotomies and cingulotomies being performed here. I mean, you wanna try reading this? It’s all kinds of fascinating—”

“Sam.”

Sam was looking at the typed up sheets. “It’s strange. I mean, the whole hotel seems to exist, essentially, out of time and very much out of sync with the world—”

 “ _Sam.”_

Sam’s eyes snapped up to meet his. “Yeah?”

“Before you came in. I saw some names.”

“Names?”

“Phineas Gage,” Dean counts on his fingers. “Anatoli Bugorski. Eadweard Muybridge. Delilah Dawson.”

Sam’s eyebrows came close together, puzzled. “I’ve never heard of those.”

 _You had to have._ Dean bit on his lip, and the pain cleared the fuzz in his head a little. “You had to have. I saw those pages. I tore them up but now they’ve—they’ve gone.”

“They’ve just…disappeared?”

Dean threw up his hands. “Yes!”

Sam stood there for a while, just staring, the shape of his mouth all dismayed. Then he picked up the sheaves and sat on the bed, patting at a spot near him for Dean to sit. “It’s just boring history. The kind you keep laughing at me for looking up. Look.”

Dean did. And they were proper pages. Whole and written from end to end, the ink just a trace smudged in places and not the nightmarish pattern he’d seen on the phantom papers from before.

“She—Doctor Hurley—she says it’s paramnesia. Or some shit like that. You’re confabulating memories, details, stuff that doesn’t exist. You’re making up things, but you can’t tell apart what is real and what is not. Like—the train. Like being stuck on those rails. None of it is real. And—and honestly we’ve been here a while, Dean. It just gets worse. I don’t know—Dr. _Hurley_ doesn’t know…”

“If it’s ever gonna get better?”

Sam threw him an anxious look from under his hair. “You’ll—you’ll get better.”

He was sitting so hunched over that Dean could see the line of his vertebra through his shirt. It looked like a position you’d take if you were in no little amount of pain. Dean thought of his dream again.

“We should get out of here.”

“We can’t,” whispered Sam. “You can’t even walk. We’re stuck here at least till your leg heals.”

“No, I’ll heal somewhere else. We’ll tell Bobby to come get us—this place gives me the creeps, seriously. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it, Sammy. Something’s just—off about it.”

Sam looked like he might cry. “You were okay with it till yesterday. You liked it heretill yesterday.”

“You were fine with me scoring a knife yesterday—”

“And then you had a freaking _seizure!”_

“Yeah, well. This place, it fucking creeps me out. I mean, it all looks like it’s the past, and _you’re_ using a freaking typewriter, and I saw a steam train yesterday, I _swear_ —”

“Dean,” Sam said, earnestly. His hand was on Dean’s foot, pressing too hard on the ankle bone. “You’re making it up. You’re making it _all_ up. You need to stop—just stop thinking too much about this, just, just listen to the doc. Trust _me._ We’re okay here. Please. _Please._ ”

*


	2. Chapter Two

These are the accidents/unexplained “deaths” that have occurred at _Inamorata:_

1901: Isaac Vaughn, worker. Killed in railroad construction accident.

1933: Caleb Harvey. Disappeared. Working in the boiler room when last seen.

1933: George M. Parker. Disappeared. Went for a walk and never came back. No body found.

1934: Mary Olive Walden. Disappeared. Last seen entering the bathhouse.

1935: Elsa Maria Bowen. Died of asphyxiation in a stuck elevator.

1935: David Orlot. Died from heavy object trauma.

All from Sam’s research. Not the boring history pages he first showed Dean, but the pages he woke Dean up in the night to show him.

“Look,” he said, his teeth a white flash in the dark. “Dean. _Look_.”

Dean grasped the sheets of paper, but somewhere between searching for the switch to turn on the night-lamp and wondering why Sam’s hand was gripping the front of his shirt so tight, he felt sleep pulling him down again.

“ _Dean,”_ Sam said, shaking him. “Dean, you have to. I’m not—”

Dean never figured out what Sam was not, because the pressure of Sam’s fingers on his shirt disappeared, he never found the light-switch, and he fell right back asleep and dreamed of losing things all over the hotel. First it was his car keys. Then his shoes. Then an Altoids can with a tooth in it.  _I lost Sammy,_ he thought upon waking, and lay in bed for five minutes with his heart trying to explode out of his chest. He read the papers. He showed it to Sam, who denied all of it.

“If it wasn’t you, then who _was it?”_

“Give me those,” Sam said. They were blank when he held them up to Dean. “There’s nothing there. There’s _nothing,_ Dean.”

The boring history page which Sam had showed him earlier said this much that Dean could read before his brain turned into mush:

The _800_ acre tract of land is located off Wolf Hall Valley Road, 300 yards east of the highway. The land was owned at first by the Parris family (c. 1895) before it was obtained by the Waites (April, 1897), and deeming it conducive a place to good health, by litigation, transferred to the Government (July, 1900) and promptly the first stone was laid, and plans for pipe-chases made to draw water, for the building that would become the _Inamorata._ Edward C. Morton was contracted via proper channel to oversee the engineering works of the hospital, and the main building was finished in a year. (March, 1901) The first patients to the hotel were admitted in September, 1901, with a staff of two doctors and five nurses.

(Photo: courtesy of Dorothea Dawson, 1901).

In Cuneiform script, you enclosed important things in cartouches for protection from malevolent forces. The years too seemed to hold some magic, enclosing secret. He did a quick run-through of every page, but the years in the brackets never got past 1950.

He felt like he was walking nose to tail in a circle, an elegant and inescapable circuit.

*

Of the places that Dean liked to walk in the hotel, the red sandstone path that curved torturously through the gardens was not one of them. It wasn’t anything that the garden did, exactly. It was just that there was a big part of him, an essential part, which scoffed at the idea of spending whole hours with nothing but tall philodendrons and topiary animals to keep him company.  If he could have a velvet robe too, he’d pretend to be a limp Dracula. He’d walk around screeching “Miiiiiiiinaaaaa” just because the absurdity of these mandatory garden-walks made him misty-eyed with despair. God, he didn’t give a damn about plants, unless they were useful in taking down monsters. The “being one with nature” part of the Winchester meronym was all Sam.

Dean grunted at a topiary bunny with a hat. The hat hid its bunny ears, but no matter, Blake’s garden shears poked out from behind it and made for sharp steel points that gleamed in the sunlight.

The man fixed Dean with a jaundiced eye as he passed. Dean gave him a cheerful wave, because he was irritated. He didn’t quite know at what, only that there was a growing sense of frustration. The strange feeling of looking at the hotel through a gauzy wall had come back this morning. At breakfast he thought he’d probably die of listening to Daisy and Rosemary going on and on about previous patients suffering from postpartum depression or psychosis. He escaped and found the stairs to the basement garage and wondered if the Impala was down there, and if it was, whether he should freak out about the artillery in the trunk. He ended up at a big red locked door, with a triangle on it. Frustrated, he put that under the growing list of things to ask Sam: where the car was. How had he forgotten? The Impala was as much a part under the Dean Winchester rubric as his leg was, and of his leg he was constantly mindful. Damn thing _hurt._

 He concentrated on the _tap-tap_ sounds of his cane, wondering when he could throw it away for good. The pain in his leg was constant and heavy, like something was crushing it still.

“Hey!” Blake called, following Dean on the other side of the regressing topiary separating them. If you coalesced them spatially, you’d get a big babushka bunny hiding five smaller ones. The garden shears snapped shut, ominously. “Have you been near the boiler room?”

Dean made a face. “That’s just weird, man, but...no?”

Blake appraised him, a long calculative look. “Are you sure?”

Dean huffed a laugh. “Dude, seriously. Why would I go near the boiler room?”

The gardener shrugged. The shears kept snapping open and close, their metronome voice a dry metal whisper. “You stay away from there. I don’t want any trouble.”

This guy was asking for some brilliant reply, something intelligent and cutting, like _fuck you_ maybe, or _get bent._ Instead, Dean shot him a wide smile and continued down the path. His head was already a mess without adding mad gardeners to it. When he turned to look, the guy was bending over to clip at some flowers, and there was a red triangle tattooed on his back.

_You’re confabulating memories, details, stuff that doesn’t exist._

Dean shook his head and forced himself out of the muddle of his thoughts. So maybe Sam was right. So maybe he was looking for symbols where symbols weren’t there, connections were connections could not be made. _Stop it,_ he thought. Stop looking for links and symbols and meanings. There weren’t any.

_You’re making up things, but you can’t tell apart what is real and what is not. Like—the train. Like being stuck on those rails._

But he’d never really told Sam about being stuck on those rails, had he?

Small detail. But that was it, with puzzle pieces and connect-the-dots and every other game that depended on sequence or tessellation. The smallest pieces mattered. The ones that were missing mattered.

_Stop it._

He’d come to the gazebo. At noon, shadows played along the white curlicue of the structure, and roses crept over the trellises surrounding it. Yesterday’s rain had collected on the concave lids of the decorative urns flanking the stairs into it, and it was quiet, and still, and peaceful. Martha May liked to walk around this thing, muttering her thing about recursion. Dean wondered if it was because she kept going in circles. All of them, trapped in some esoteric mandala.

The garden ended with a wall of tall, elegantly pruned golden grasses behind the gazebo, and a pool of water lilies and fronds lay just beyond. You could see all that from the gazebo. That, and the fallow, overgrown land beyond, where the healthier patients did vegetable gardening in the summer. Now, with winter settling in, he imagined ice would be strangling the roots of the wild plants that still grew there.

He almost thought it was an eye-trick at first, an unimaginative magic illusion cropped up thanks to misfiring neurons in his brain, but he looked again and there was Sam. Standing with his back to Dean near the pool, looking in. His head was down, shoulders almost slumped, but his hands kept moving restlessly, brushing at his clothes, dislodging soot. His hair was messy and tangled, as if he hadn’t combed it in days, and that was just _so_ unlike Sam that Dean called out, immediately, weird panic drumming in his blood. Sam turned, a quick flash of surprise flitting across his face, and whatever Dean wanted to say was caught in his throat, lost somewhere deep between his brain and his mouth.

“Dude,” he said instead, hushed whisper. “What happened to your clothes?”

Sam looked down and shrugged. “I don’t know. Fucking boiler room. There was a whole lot of coal dust in there.”

“ _You’re_ the one poking around in the boiler room? That guy Blake was at _my_ throat.”

Sam grinned, faint scarlet flash, almost helpless, and there was that again: the strangeness that Dean couldn’t quite put a name to, the thing that threw his thoughts out of loop.

A secret dizziness crept up his spine.

“Dean,” Sam said, smiling wide. “You see me.”

This Sam; the flush in his cheeks and that crazy way he sometimes looked at Dean, like he was keeping a secret just for them, _this_ Sam and the way he smiled—

 _I know you,_ Dean thought, was appalled by it and shook his head to dislodge the thought. Like a moth circling back to light, it came back again. It buzzed in his veins like fiery dessert.

_I know you. How do I know you?_

“There’s something there. In the boiler room, I mean, I want to show you, but you have to come quick—”

There was a sound like doomsday trumpets.

 Dean jumped, cursed and nearly landed all his weight on his bad leg, pain corkscrewing up his thigh and booming in his hip. He dropped the cane and stared wildly from the path he’d just walked to the tesserae of the gazebo floor, and then whirled around to look back at the pool again, but no Sam.

“Sammy?”

 _Don’t look for portents._ Right. That was working so well.

He picked up the cane again and pursed his lips, a flare of dull anger shooting through him. He wanted Sam. There was something off about this whole picture, and sooty, messy, helplessly grinning Sam was a puzzle piece he had to slot into place.

“SAM!”

Blake pushed through the shrubbery instead, his eyes wild. “What was that noise?”

“I dunno. Did you see my brother?”

“Who?”

“My brother, he just _disappeared._ ”

But Blake was already storming down the path towards the hotel.

It quickly became clear that the sound could only be accredited to the old wall on the left side of the conservatory, which had simply fallen. When Dean hobbled to it, a dismal knot of people had already formed around it. Most of the patients were there, having been startled out of beds or from their reading or card-playing, and conversations had already deviated from thoughts on the wall to other, more random things.

Dean came to a stop near Florence and Daisy, who were discussing hotel-deaths with Rosemary and an ancient Italian ballerina whose name he didn’t know.

“And poor Mr. Morgan, if you remember, found in the pool! The fish had had at him a bit when they found him, it was terrible—”

“Liliana Velasquez. You remember her? She died right here in the conservatory. Hung herself from the rafters, but God knows how she managed to get up that high!”

“There was that man, Duchannes, of course, if your memory of this place goes that back, Rosemary,” Florence leaned in to whisper. “Kept talking about some wife and child, talking _to them,_ but they weren’t really there, were they? Oh, the poor man. Lost them in an accident a year ago at the shipyard, went cuckoo! He finally just killed himself, but not before his ghosts began whispering poison in his years—”

“—Dr. Hurley tried, she did, she tried telling him it was just his imagination—”

“Absolutely _horrible_ , though, wasn’t it, Daisy? We’ll never forget that man’s face. What was his first name, Duchannes’? Something starting with ‘S’, I can’t quite remember—”

“Stephen,” said Dean, surprising himself. “Stephen Duchannes, 47, from Key West.”

The three woman turned to stare at him.

One by one their faces closed off, going doughy and expressionless, until Dean was starting to think of backing away, just turning tail and limping back to his room.

Florence smiled. “Why, of course.”

“We mustn’t forget.”

“The hotel doesn’t forget its victims.”

“ _Never.”_

Their eyes were on him, soft and liquid-kind, like ink spots that would overflow and spill down their cheeks at any time. Dean shot them a discombobulated grin, dragging one hand through his hair and making a jagged, indecipherable noise in reply.

“ _Stephen,_ ” said Rosemary. “Of _course.”_

“I think I’ll—,” Dean started, and made a shrugging motion towards the main building. He suddenly couldn’t breathe. “Sam’s probably—he’ll be waiting for me.”

“Of course. Sam. Your _brother._ ”

“Ghastly, really, one’s misperceptions—”

“ _Misperceptions?_ Ghosts, Daisy. Your own past, becoming your ghosts—”

 _He’s not a fucking ghost,_ Dean thought, ignoring the sweat beading at the back of his neck and the pain making him grunt as he moved fast as he could to get away from them and the conservatory. _He’s not._

*

“The wall near the conservatory fell,” Dean told Sam, when he came into their room and locked the door behind him. Sam—soot-less now, and clean, his hair normal and soft, and typewriter-ribbon ink on his fingers—looked up from a book and gave him a smile.

“I heard the noise.”

“Why didn’t you come down?”

Sam shrugged. So, his haunting ground was this one room. Or probably Dean. It would make sense that if Sam were haunting something, it would be Dean. Dean tugged off his jacket, letting it fall to the ground before hobbling painfully to the bed and collapsing on it. Face muffled in his comforter, he asked, “What’s in the boiler room?”

Sam’s head snapped up. “ _What?”_ He sounded sharp, curious, _strange,_ like he was hiding acute eyeteeth under his lips.

“Nothing,” Dean sighed, picking up a book on the bed and turning its pages.

Sam was quiet then. No typewriter clicks, no movements, just _quiet._ Dean opened the book to Chapter One. There was a quote from Shakespeare. Ridiculous; it was about preparing to hear about losses. Kingdoms lost. Losses incurred. He shut the book again.

Sam said, “Don’t go in the boiler room. It’s—old and dusty in there, it’s—you’ll make yourself worse—”

 _And the lies get more desperate._ Lying there, Dean haemorrhaged lies and madness, farces and backdrops. What was real, and what was not? Everything seemed contradictory, each version real as the rest, each damned and equally terrible.

“Hey,” blurted Dean, after a while, “You remember that case in Pittsburgh, with the car?”

Sam, sitting on the window-seat now and watching the rain patter against the glass, made an aborted shrug. “Uh, not really—”

Dean kept turning the pages of his book. What was it even? _The Last of the Mohicans,_ said the title. The letters on the page seemed to be running around. The lamp on the table washed the room in a sickly yellow-white that made Dean nauseous. He thought, _I don’t know you_. The thought unfurled inside him, slow as the worst kind of sickness.

“1958 Plymouth Fury,” announced Dean. “Bad fucking mojo. It was turning people to ketchup on the roads. This dumb schmuck restored it and it nearly took his soul. You almost choked on a burger during that case, don’t tell me you don’t remember!”

Sam put his forehead to the glass, making a suspicious face, and then he brightened with the memory. “Oh. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Why d’you ask?”

“Huh? Um, no reason.”

“You should take your pills. They’re on the table.”

Dean got off his bed and hitched slowly to where Sam was, stopping to grab the pills and the water. No need to make anyone suspicious. He popped them in his mouth and swallowed, drowning the water while leaning to stare out through the window with his hand on Sam’s shoulder. The rain fogged up everything, made it seem like the hotel existed in some netherworld, unmoored from the land of the living. Sam’s legs were folded up on the window-seat and he shifted now, making space for Dean, but Dean shook his head, brushing his fingers through Sam’s hair, letting them rest against the base of his neck. He rubbed circles there, tugged lightly at the small curls, rested a thumb beneath the neck-line of Sam’s T-shirt and against his collarbone. Sam sighed and made a tiny noise, something between confusion and content.

Quick as lightning, Dean made a tiny nick on Sam’s shoulder with his small shaving razor, watching droplets of blood bloom.

Sam’s arm whipped out to grab Dean’s, holding up the soiled razor so it pointed, almost artistically, right at Sam’s eye-level. “What’s _wrong_ with you?”

Dean laughed, tasting resentment and desperation in his own voice. Then the breakers were succumbing to the storm. “It wasn’t you at the pool today, was it? Not _you,_ you. Just like it wasn’t _you_ who typed those pages of names. I think there’s possibly _two_ of you—which is just one thing in a whole laundry list of things that make no sense. One of you wants me to go to the boiler room—”

Sam, shaking his head, tugged at Dean’s hand, pawed at his shoulders, his eyes pleading. “What are you even talking about?”

His heart was galloping too fast. Was that normal? “I’m saying you’re not my brother. You bleed, so you’re not a ghost—”

Sam laughed, incredulous. “Dean, you’re making no sense—”

“That car case was the fucking plot of _Christine,_ Sam, and you fell for it.”

 “I—Dean, you know we aren’t thinking right, _both_ of us aren’t. It was Lafayette—”

“It’s not about—,” he lost his track of thought and the room swam for a second, before coming back in clear, ringing focus. “Not—not what happened in Lafayette. _Sam._ It’s about _here,_ about this place, this place makes no sense, it—”

“I’m getting Doctor Hurley,” said Sam, but he didn’t move. “You keep breaking out. I need to get Doctor Hurley.”

Dizziness washed over Dean. Suspicious now, he picked up the glass of water and the pills. Just aspirin. The last of the water spilled from the glass at his slackening grip.

“So why aren’t you?”

In answer, Sam reached out and touched his cheek, big hand and fingers splayed to press his thumb beneath the line of Dean’s jaw. “I don’t need to. Not right now.”

The light from the lamp fractured suddenly, split into kaleidoscopic shards that seemed to pierce right through Dean’s eyes to pick at fresh frontal lobe.

“You gave me something,” Dean hissed, copper taste in his mouth, pennies and wave-tumbled cans and old-blood taste. The ceiling flashed in and out like cerebral circuitry. Sam swam in and out of his vision, calm, clinically curious.

“Metrazol, actually,” he said, raised eyebrow, appraising glance. “But that wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

 _No, it wouldn’t._ But falling, the world darkening and then blooming in and out in brightly coloured spurts, he reckoned it couldn’t just be a painkiller. Sam was tall from wherever he was, man become a storm of colour and whiteness, his lightning pulling it all apart. Rat-teeth cold gnawed at Dean’s consciousness, and if he didn’t let it, if he fought it, it would sink its teeth in deep and drag out everything that mattered, bit by bit, set everything on fire, and then what would he be left with? 

So he made an image of Sam in his head—real Sam, not this quiet stranger he’d been living with all these weeks, not this Sam, _never_ —symbol for all he stood to lose, and stepped into the dark.

*

Sam’s voice said, from somewhere in the dark: _“Blunt trauma. There are reports of it all over history. People changing after major accidents.”_

Dean’s eyes flew open.  He sat up, alone on the bed, and peered into the dark.

No Sam.

The door into their room was open, so he got slowly out of bed. The cane was right where he’d left it. Hobbling while he pulled on his shirt, Dean limped to the door. The cane made too much noise. It made him wince.

Outside, the hallway had lost its pristine, precise shapes. It peeled and stank of mildew and rot. Centuries of water made a topography of black against the walls, and all the metal fixtures had melted like Dali clocks. By some bizarre violation of time and space, Dean couldn’t see the end of the corridor.

He realized he was sweating, despite the cool air.

“Sam?” he called, taking a few painful steps forward. He counted them, as he’d been doing for the past two weeks. Fifteen paces, and he’d reach Rosemary’s room. Thirty, and he’d reach the elevator. At fifteen, Dean was at a door, but it opened into an empty room. Something tiny and dark scuttled over the twisted hunk of a bed and disappeared. Not Rosemary, unless it was zombie-Rosemary’s zombie-hand.

At thirty paces, Dean stood in front of an empty elevator shaft.

He thought suddenly of poor Elsa Maria Bowen (died, 1935). Did she have the same weird nightmare that led her to the elevator which promptly got stuck?

Something behind him. Dean turned around too fast, expecting anything at all, but it was only Sam, armed with a flashlight. His face was grimy and dirty, and his hands full of soot. They fell to his feet , blooming grotesque flowers.

He was smiling.

Behind him, the hallway was back to normal. Neat, clean, suffocating.

“Come with me,” Sam said, his smile voracious. “I want to show you something.”

He helped Dean into the reappeared elevator. Sam’s skin felt hot against his, like maybe he was running a fever. The heat cut through Dean’s bones and melted his sluggish blood and he thought of how Sammy had been cold these two weeks, his fingers always cold when they dipped beneath Dean’s shirt, a paradox to this burning Sam.

The doors shut. It was bright in there, too bright, and Sam brushed ash off his jacket.

He looked strangely unreal. Dean swallowed hard.

“You wrote those names.” Dean said, sure of this now. “And then the other one said you didn’t.”

“It’s a riddle, Dean. One of us is trying to help. The other one is not.”

“You. You’re trying to help—”

“How would you know?”

 _Because I know you,_ thought Dean, helplessly. “I didn’t know _he_ was wrong, until I had something to compare with.”

Sam gazed at him: a long, fierce look. He was probably everything the other Sam wasn’t, thought Dean. He was not easy, not simple, a tangle of thought and love and intention that made Dean work to figure him out. The differences were minute, so much of an undercurrent that no one could have told them apart, but _Dean,_ Dean could tell—with this Sam here, he could _tell._ That was what shape-shifters and demons and other monsters that looked like people didn’t get. The little things gave them away. When you were looking at a person you’ve known better than anyone else, they were not merely a sum total of all these smaller parts but a gestalt form that couldn’t truly be taken apart.

There was Sam, and Dean could hardly breathe with the intensity of it all.   

“Phineas Gage. 1848,” Sam said, speaking quick and breathless, like he didn’t have enough time, “Railroad accident. The guy got a 30 centimetre metal pole right through his brain and he survived, but his personality changed drastically.”

“What—?”

Sam moved closer, trapping Dean against the wall. His eyes were dark, pupils blown out with some strange emotion. He pressed a palm against Dean’s chest and leaned towards him. “Anatoli Bugorski. 1978. Particle scientist, whose head was in the path of a proton-beam accelerator. His skin and bones melted where the beam passed through. But he survived. With a hole burned clean through his skull.”

Dean made a gasping sound at the back of his throat. The elevator death-rattled its way towards the first floor.

“I told you all this before,” Sam said, worried. He was pale under the soot and grime, blood-loss pale. Dean put an arm around him because he was suddenly unsure if Sam would fall. “Don’t you remember? I told you everything. I made notes, because we couldn’t figure it out. You read—”

This was weird. This was weirder than fucking _weird_. They were in an elevator and Sam was saying shit about people who had things put through their brains or beams blowing holes in their brains and he was leaning in, close, their breaths synching up.

“Eadweard Muybridge?” Dean asked, quietly, his fingers threading through Sam’s hair.

“Eadweard Muybridge,” sighed Sam, “was a famous photographer. Stagecoach accident cracked his head open—he invented stuff after that, brilliant stuff, like animated photographs and zoopraxiscopes, but he also killed people. Shot his wife’s lover,” he was staring at Dean’s mouth, “He- he could-he was psychic. They say. He was psychic and he could. _You have to remember all this, Dean._ I told you all this. Before. I toldyou _._ Muybridge, he could hear people’s thoughts—he could—”

Their lips crushed together. Dean could taste soot and ash, but also _Sam_ beneath all that, and his fingers snarled in Sam’s hair. The angle was awful and the pain from his leg was driving him half crazy, but there was something desperate about this, something terrifying, and he held on. Sam was kissing him; quick, desperate kisses, like Dean was something he needed to live; and Dean was trying, trying to remember, trying to fix him. Fix himself. What was the difference? There had never been any difference. He sucked at Sam’s lip, tasted something new.

Salt, iron. Blood.

Sam pulled away, arms curling around himself and face turned away, a heavy string of blood trailing from his mouth.

“And D-Delilah Dawson?”

Sam slid down the elevator wall. The more he rubbed at his mouth, the redder his hand came away. He was shaking, soft moans strangling at his jaw.

“Sam. The elevator’s stopping. You’ve to tell me now. Who’s Delilah Dawson? _Sam!_ ”

Sam sobbed and shook his head. He was hiding his face in his hands. There was too much blood for him to speak.

“What did you want to show me? Is it in the boiler-room? _Sammy._ Come on! _”_

The elevator stopped.

*

 


End file.
